adventures in history, disability, and faith

How to Post a PDF

For months I’ve wanted to be able to post PDFs to my blog and was baffled that I couldn’t find any recent how-to advice in WP’s Help archives. Nor could I find anything recent in plain old Internet searches.

I’m going to risk deducing there are no recent how-to’s because it is SO SIMPLE. Once someone lets you in on the secret that WP considers a PDF file “Media” it is as simple as uploading a picture.

But, like me, you may not have software on your computer that can convert any file to a PDF. (Actually, I have a have Adobe Acrobat. But upgrading to the conversion feature costs almost $90 per year.)

Perhaps even better than free, it is easy to use. PDFlite installs itself like a printer driver. You open the file you want to convert in the program you created it in, like Word or Excel. Then choose File/Print as if you intend to make a paper copy. But select PDFlite from the printer menu instead of your computer. Select “Print.” PDFlite will open a dialogue box asking where you want to save the PDF you are about to create. Name and save your file. PDFlite creates the PDF and saves it.

Then to get the PDF onto your blog, in WordPress, use the camera/music icon on the upload/insert menu just like inserting a picture. Except you’ll browse to find your PDF, select it and insert it. WordPress automatically uses the PDF file name to create a live link to your PDF file.

That’s it! Now I have to go to my history blog and will happily begin converting appropriate content to PDFs :).